A Godzilla-like baby monster at the top of the iron tower is roaring. At the bottom of the tower, another one is looking up and roaring. The artist drew this employing a special effect, wondering what it would be like if we could eliminate problems caused by nuclear power plants by reviving Godzilla born from a hydrogen-bomb. However this is not the artist’s personal conviction, but just a small thought that it may be nice if this kind of thing happens. Love is given to contradictions arising from it, special effects, and incidents that occurred at the tower.

Hiroki Kakinuma is a half Indonesian artist born in 1985. He grew up in Tokyo.

He is already a popular artist among Asian collectors especially Indonesia. His artworks are characterized by the bold compositions of bird's-eye view and elaborated description of motifs. The stage he creates goes freely beyond

the common senses in terms of times and places and you may find yourself having an illusion that you are lost in a world of science fiction.

After appreciating his artworks from a distance you feel the need of come closer to look for the most interesting details. His sophisticated artworks must fascinate a lot of people the same as they do Japanese precision machine.

Two giant fighting cocks descend on a housing complex similar to the one where the artist grew up, as a motif. This housing complex, a tiny piece of Tokyo that he knows and no longer exists, is far different from the glamorous Tokyo that everybody has in their minds. This is his first attempt at a “Tokyo Complex” (what the artist wants to call it) series to reflect the sad reality and a sense of loss of his home.

«The uncanny existence approaching our sphere of life is like an image of a monster that appeared in the Ultraman (a Japanese super hero) which I watched on TV when I was a child. At the same time, by depicting the life of ordinary people I deal with the fact, as a theme, there is only a thin line between "ordinary days" and hidden "fear" symbolized by unexpected monsters.»

Using a frame and elastic fabric I wanted to create photography that seemed like painted canvas. Once again, I tried to minimize the use of Photoshop. The result is truly amazing. The models look like paintings from the nineteenth century!

In 2012, Camden, NJ became not only the poorest city in America, but--following massive public safety layoffs the year before--the most dangerous. By year’s end, there were a record 67 homicides, and though most were related to drugs and gang warfare, many involved children and victims whose only crime was living in Camden. It became a year for activism, with a daylong summer boxing tournament to promote peace, and a field of crosses in front of City Hall to remember the murder victims and bring attention to the tragedy. By December, a gun buyback in Camden that had yielded only about 50 guns the year before netted over a thousand weapons from residents, many of whom cited frustration with all the violence.

A young Viet Cong suspect cries after hearing a rifle shot. His captors, Chinese Nung tribesmen in the service of the U.S. Special Forces, pretended to shoot his father, a ruse designed to make the boy reveal information about Communist guerrillas. (UPI)

"Un grupo de las Fuerzas Especiales cuelga y tortura a un Vietcong que ha matado a una niña / A U.S. Special Forces team strung up and tortured a Viet Cong who had shot a little girl",

Textos en inglés / English translation

On May 23 is the birthday of

Vitek Ludvik, Czech photographer of adventure and sports and cameraman born in 1973.

He started in photography at age 10 with a camera that was a gift from his grandfather. At 14 He started rock climbing and always had a camera around his neck. After finished technical engineering school, he left for a surfing trip to Hawaii where he discovered the magic of landscape photography.

He got seriously into photography on a trip to Mt. McKinley in 1996. His work was first published in 1997 and in the same year, he founded Sharp Pictures, a multimedia agency specializing in the international sport industry. Since then, he has been working as a freelance photographer. He shoots catalogs and ads for several clients. He also make and collaborate on movies, including Goosneck and Real Night in Prague (mountain biking) and Just One Day (snowboarding).

Sylvia Plachy, Hungarian/American photographer born in Bodapest in 1943.

Plachy's family moved to New York City in 1958, after the Hungarian revolution. She started photographing in 1964 "with an emphasis of recording the visual character of the city along with its diverse occupants". Plachy studied photography at the Pratt Institute in New York City, receiving her B.F.A. in 1965. There she met the photographer André Kertész, who became her lifelong friend.

Plachy's photo essays and portraits have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, Granta, Artforum, Fortune, and other publications. They have been exhibited in galleries and museums in Berlin, Budapest, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, Paris and Tokyo, and are in collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Plachy's first book, Sylvia Plachy's Unguided Tour, won the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography for best publication in 1991. Her book Self Portrait with Cows Going Home (2005), a personal history of Central Europe with photographs and text, received a Golden Light Award for best book in 2004.

Plachy lives in New York City with her husband, Elliot Brody, and is the mother of Academy Award-winning actor Adrien Brody.

Luca Pierro, Italian photographer born in Cantú, Como, in 1978. He currently lives and works in Milan.

At the age of thirteen, when he received his first camera, a Polaroid, he falls in love with photography and art in general, under the influence of parents, in particular, his mother, a painter. At the age of sixteen tests the first experiments in the darkroom.

At nineteen he moved to Rome to undertake university studies in Law. During this period, while continuing to love photography, he devoted himself to the music, his other great passion.

In recent years his research focuses on artistic portraits.

Taking inspiration from painting and the surrealism in particular, Luca tried to recreate in his portraits ethereal surrealistic atmospheres.

Rather than relying too heavily on the visual manipulation techniques acquired through post-production editing, Pierro incorporates natural materials like flour, milk, and water on set, within the frame of the shoot.​

Luca works on advertising for many important clients like Samsung, Microsoft, KIA, Daily News, Bloomberg and more.

He has exhibited in Italy and abroad since 2011 and received several awards for his work.

Naomi Harris, Canadian photographer born in Toronto in 1973, living in New York, USA.

After completing her Bachelor in Fine Arts from York University, Toronto, she moved to New York where she received her photographic training at New York’s International Center of Photography.

She moved to Miami Beach in December 1999 to begin her first personal project documenting the last hotel in South Beach that catered to senior citizens. The project, called “Haddon Hall Hotel ” received The International Prize for Young Photojournalism presented by Agfa and Das Bildforum in Germany in 2001

While living in Miami, she would frequent a nude beach where she began photographing fellow sun worshipers. Shortly thereafter she learned that many of the other beach goers were also swingers. After attending a party she decided she had to photograph this subculture.

Upon returning to New York in April 2002 she began researching the lifestyle and did her first swinger shoot in July 2003 in Black River Falls, WI. This was to be the first of over 38 parties she would photograph in 48 months all over the US.

The project was realized in America Swings, her first monograph published by Taschen in October 2008. It was edited by Dian Hanson and includes an interview by artist Richard Prince who sought out Harris after seeing her work in Taschen’s The New Erotic Photography.

The trade edition of America Swings was released by Taschen in August 2010.

April Saul, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1955. She specializes in documentary photojournalism.

Saul has photographed and written for The Philadelphia Inquirer since 1981. In 1997, Saul, along with Inquirer reporter Michael Vitez and photographer Ron Cortes, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism for a series of articles on end-of-life care, telling the stories of terminally-ill patients who wished to die with dignity.

Saul became a photographer at The Baltimore Sun in 1980, and the following year, joined the staff of the Philadelphia Inquirer. She was the first recipient of the Nikon/ NPPA Documentary Sabbatical Grant for her work on Hmong refugees in 1985.

Over the last twenty-five years, she has won numerous honors.

In January 2006, Saul "vowed to document in words and photos the death of every child by gun in the eight-county Philadelphia region in 2006." The resulting column in the Philadelphia Inquirer was called "Kids, Guns and a Deadly Toll."

Luigi Veronesi, Italian photographer, painter, scenographer and film director born in 1908.

He started his artistic activity in the 1920s by training as textile designer and by practising photography. He was introduced by Raffaelle Giolli in a group of Italian intellectuals associated with the review Poligono. At the age of 20, he was interested for painting and took lessons with the Neapolitan painter Carmelo Violante, then professor at the Accademia Carrara of Bergamo.

In 1932 he travelled to Paris and met Fernand Léger. His first works were presented in the Gallery Il Milione in Milan. They were still figurative. Later, Veronesi started to research in the direction of abstract art. In 1934, he exhibits xylographic works with the German artist Josef Albers in the Gallery Il Milione. In the same year he joined the photographic group Abstraction-Création in Paris, he experimented constructivism, and adhered to the Bauhaus method. On 4 March 1935, he participated to the first collective exhibition of abstract art of Italy in the atelier of the painters Felice Casorati and Enrico Paolucci in Turin together with the artists Oreste Bogliardi, Cristoforo De Amicis, Ezio D'Errico, Lucio Fontana, Virginio Ghiringhelli, Osvaldo Licini, Fausto Melotti, Mauro Reggiani and Atanasio Soldati, who signed the Manifest of the first collective exhibition of Italian abstract art. In 1936, Veronesi was the illustrator of a geometry book of Leonardo Sinisgalli and he participated to the triennal of Milan. In that year he also participated to an exhibition of abstract art in the city of Como with other artists. In 1939 he made a personal exhibition in the Gallerie L'Equipe in Paris.

Veronesi was also active in theatre and cinema with nine experimental and abstract films made between 1938 and 1980, seven of which were destroyed during bombing in World War II.

He was a polyvalent and eclectic artist who managed to synthesise the avant-garde movements of various regions of Europe.

Joyce Tenneson, American fine art photographer born in 1945, known for her distinctive style of photography, which often involves nude or semi-nude women. Tenneson shoots primarily with the Polaroid 20x24 camera. In an interview with a photography magazine, Tenneson advised artists: "I very strongly believe that if you go back to your roots, if you mine that inner territory, you can bring out something that is indelibly you and authentic - like your thumbprint. It's going to have your style because there is no one like you." As a child, her parents worked on the grounds of a convent. She and her sister "were enlisted to be in holiday pageants and processions. It was a mysterious environment - something out of Fellini - filled with symbolism, ritual, beauty, and also a disturbing kind of surreal imagery."

Her work has been displayed in more than 100 exhibitions around the world. Tenneson has had cover images on several magazines including Time, Life, Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, Premiere, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine.

He is perhaps best known as one of the first masters of color photography. PDN voted him as one of the 20 most influential photographers of all time and in 1981 the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) awarded him its Outstanding Achievement in Photography honor.

Noted critic A. D. Coleman described the work of Pete Turner as having "A dramatist's sense of event, intense and saturated coloration, and a distinct if indescribable otherness are omnipresent in Turner's images".

He graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1956 along with classmates Bruce Davidson and Jerry Uelsmann.

His photographs are in the permanent collections of many major museums, including the Paris Foreign Missions Society (MEP), the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. The George Eastman House in Rochester is the depository of Turner’s life’s work and where his retrospective exhibit, “Pete Turner: Empowered by Color”, opened in 2007.

In 1986, Turner published his first monograph, Pete Turner Photographs (Abrams). His second book, Pete Turner African Journey (Graphis Inc., 2001), documents Turner's many adventures in Africa, beginning with his trek in 1959 from Cape Town to Cairo with Wally Byam's famous Airstream caravan. The Color of Jazz (Rizzoli, 2006) is a comprehensive collection of his provocative album covers for CTI Records among many others.

Sean Leslie Flynn Carré, American actor and freelance photojournalist born in 1941, best known for his coverage of the Vietnam War.

Flynn was the only child of Australian-American actor Errol Flynn and his first wife, French actress Lili Damita. After studying briefly at Duke University, he embarked on an acting career. He retired by the mid-1960s to become a freelance photojournalist under contract to Time.

In a search of exceptional images, he traveled with Special forces units and irregulars operating in remote areas. While on assignment in Cambodia in April 1970, Flynn and fellow photojournalist Dana Stone were captured by communist guerrillas. Neither man was seen or heard from again.

The last religious symbolic painting Nesterov painted before the revolution. The picture depicts the Russian people following a young boy, while in the background a Russian religious figure, an old holy fool, stays aside, praying ecstatically, wearing no clothes and possibly warning the people.

Sylvia Daoust, born in Montreal in 1902, was one of the first female sculptors in Quebec.

She graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal (Montreal School of Fine Arts), but also studied in Europe. In France she studied with Henri Charlier. As well as working as a professional sculptor, she taught at the École des Beaux-Arts de Québec from 1930 to 1943, then at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal from 1943 to 1968.

The majority of her works are religious in content and form. They have been described as a mixture between religious classicism and realism. Her works include the Nicolas Viel bronze adorning the façade of the Quebec Legislature (National Assembly), Mary Queen of the World at Montreal's Mary, Queen of the World Cathedral, and a statue of Édouard Montpetit at the Université de Montréal.

Daoust's works are in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada and Corbet Collection of Canadian Women Artists, among others.

Antônio Caringi, Brazilian sculptor born in 1905 in Pelotas, considered the most important in the history of art in the state of Rio Grande do Sul.

He was known as the "sculptor of the Pampas" by the choice for his works of regional issues, linked to the history and the gaucho culture. One of his most important works is the statue of roper, official symbol of the city of Porto Alegre, capital of Rio Grande do Sul.

He was a student of Professor Francis Pelichek, with whom he studied design at the Institute of Fine Arts. In 1925 he exhibited works in plaster at the Salon d'Automne in Porto Alegre, historical exhibition in which also presented works other relevant future artists like Cosme Sotero, Oscar Boeira and João Fahrion.

After working for years in several countries as cultural attache, he returned to Brazil and began to sculpt several of the most important monuments Rio Grande do Sul.

Manuel Muñoz Barberán, Spanish painter and writer born in Lorca, Murcia, in 1921.

He began artistically in the Municipal Academy of Lorca, directed by Francisco Cayuela. He was expelled for indiscipline. Thanks to his mother returned to be admitted and could continue his studies. In the 30s he moved to Garrucha.

At the beginning of the Civil War he returned with his family to Lorca, and began working in the photographic workshop of Juan Navarro Morata.

In the early 40s he moved to Cehegín. Begins a period in which the painter travels to Zaragoza, Barcelona and Madrid, visiting the main exhibition halls and museums.

Muñoz Barberán up residence in Murcia but often travels to Madrid, taking the opportunity to complete his training in the Fine Arts and making copies of paintings from the Prado Museum.

The urban theme has been the favorite of his painting. In 1957 he visited Rome for the first time, and returned to Italy on numerous occasions spending long visits to Florence and Venice, which were reflected in his paintings, watercolors and sketchbooks. He also visited and painted in other countries.

José Vela Zanetti, Spanish painter and muralist born in 1913 who worked in Spain, the Dominican Republic and the United States.

He spent his childhood in León and later moved to Madrid, where he studied under José Ramón Zaragoza. In 1931, his first solo exhibition was held in León. He was awarded a scholarship to study in Italy in 1933.

In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, Vela Zanetti’s father was executed for his socialist beliefs. At the end of the war, in 1939, Vela Zanetti went into exile in the Dominican Republic, as did artists Josep Gausachs and Eugenio Granell.

Vela Zanetti was extremely successful in the Dominican Republic. He had his first solo exhibition in Santo Domingo a year after his arrival, and his career as a muralist flourished. Vela Zanetti was commissioned to paint more than 100 murals in the country, including works in the Justice Building, Central Bank and National Library (all in Santo Domingo). In addition to working as an artist, he became a professor at the National School of Fine Arts in Santo Domingo in 1945, and was named the school’s director in 1949.

Vela Zanetti won a Guggenheim Fellowship for Hispanic artists in 1951. He used the fellowship to travel to New York and decided to stay for several years. In 1953, he painted his most famous work Mankind's Struggle for a Lasting Peace, a mural at the UN headquarters in New York. Painted in a somber palette of blues and browns, the work depicts the horrors of war and shows people working together to rebuild the world.

In 1960 he returned to Milagros, Spain, living in the house where he was born. In his later years, the artist focused on easel paintings, particularly portraits, still lifes, landscapes and religious works.

Robert William Willson, American artist and sculptor born in 1912, notable for his creative use of solid glass.

Educated in the American Southwest and in Mexico, he also studied glass in Murano, Italy. He had an especially close artistic association with Venice, spending thirty-seven summers there making glass sculptures.

As a young man of twenty-three, Willson was swept up in the Mexican Revolution, briefly painted with Diego Rivera, and was befriended by Frida Kahlo, Jos Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo, many of whom he captured in photographs. Part of Mexican art history, too, Willson was among the first U.S.-born artists in the 1930s to adapt Mayan and Mexican folk art imagery. His art continually blended ancient Mayan imagery with ancient Venetian glassmaking techniques.

Willson was a diarist, correspondent, art magazine contributor, museum catalogue author, and loquacious television interview subject. His observations included prescient comments, not only about the future of glass in American art and architecture, but also about major and minor figures of Mexican and Italian art, the Mexican muralists of his youth, and three generations of Murano glass masters—Barbini, Zuffi, Guarnieri, Rosin, Signoretto, Raffaeli—all of whom he hired to execute his increasingly massive forms. Willson’s writings form an important international archive, part of the tradition of American artists who traveled abroad for instruction, exhibitions, acceptance, and recognition.

Alberto Urdaneta, Colombian artist and painter born in 1845. He was one of the most interesting personalities of the nineteenth century as a caricaturist, journalist, writer, art collector, farmer, military and professor; but all these facets of his life, it is worth noting his enthusiasm for culture, which encouraged him to be a fruitful cultural promoter.

He studied at the Institute of Christ, at the Seminary of the Jesuits and finally at the Academy of Mutis. In 1865 he traveled to Paris, where he learned the methods for agriculture and livestock. Back to the country in 1868, he was given the task of founding "El Agricultor", information organ that helped him start as a journalist. In 1876 he became actively involved with the guerrillas "El Mochuelo / The Little Owl", movement formed by young conservative fighting against the radical government of Aquileo Parra.

From his revolutionary position, he published the newspaper El Mochuelo (1877), characterized by its content of an open criticism of radicalism, accompanied by scathing caricatures that he himself created.

Apolitical, or better, accommodating all trends and parties. This strategy allowed him to have the cooperation of the personalities of art and literature. For this reason, his newspaper was regarded as a peace project in Colombia which was maintained during the nineteenth century.

Vanessa Bell (née Stephen), English painter and interior designer born in 1879, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf.

After the deaths of her mother in 1895 and her father in 1904, Vanessa moved to Bloomsbury with Virginia and brothers Thoby and Adrian, where they met and began socialising with the artists, writers and intellectuals who would come to form the Bloomsbury Group. The Bloomsbury Group's first Thursday evening meetings began at Bell's house in Gordon Square.

In 1906, when Bell started to think of herself as an artist, she formed the Friday Club to create a place in London that was more favourable to painting. Vanessa was encouraged by the Post-Impressionist exhibitions organised by Roger Fry, and she copied their bright colours and bold forms in her artworks. In 1914, she turned to Abstraction.

Bell rejected the examples of Victorian narrative painting and rejected a discourse on the ideal and aberrant qualities of femininity. Some of Vanessa Bell’s works were related to her personal life.

Bell is one of the most celebrated painters of the Bloomsbury group. She exhibited in London and Paris during her lifetime, and has been praised for innovative works during her early maturity and for her contributions to design.

Mikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov (Михаи́л Васи́льевич Не́стеров), Russian painter born in 1862, a major representative of religious Symbolism in Russian art.

He was a pupil of Pavel Chistyakov at the Imperial Academy of Arts, but later allied himself with the group of artists known as the Peredvizhniki. His canvas The Vision of the Youth Bartholomew (1890-91), depicting the conversion of medieval Russian Saint Sergei Radonezhsky, is often considered to be the earliest example of the Russian Symbolist style.

From 1890 to 1910, Nesterov lived in Kiev and Saint Petersburg, working on frescoes in St. Vladimir's Cathedral and the Church on Spilt Blood, respectively. After 1910, he spent the remainder of his life in Moscow, working in the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent. As a devout Orthodox Christian, he did not accept the Bolshevik Revolution but remained in Russia until his death, painting the portraits of Ivan Ilyin, Ivan Pavlov, Ksenia Derzhinskaya, Otto Schmidt, and Vera Mukhina, among others.

This is an open art blog, so you could find images eventually offensive or umconfortable.

If you're an artist and find here images of your art you want to be removed, just tell me and I'll do it immediately. I try to ask for permission always if artist is alive and there's a way to contact, bot not always is possible and there are things I think worth to be known.

In any case, the copyrights of all the images contained in this blog, except where noted, belong to the artists or the legal owners of such rights, and have been published nonprofit and for the only purpose of make the works known to the general public.

Enjoy "El Hurgador", make any comment you like (respecting artists, other visitors and myself), make suggestions, critics, leave your opinions and make your contributions. Always welcome.